With the fast development of Internet services, the data volume borne, processed, and stored on a network also increases exponentially, imposing increasingly high requirements for the capacity, performance, and availability of the storage system. A storage medium commonly used by Internet servers and storage arrays is hard disk, for example, hard disk drive. However, the failure rate of hard disk drives is high, and the performance is low. Therefore, during actual applications, hard disk drives often use the Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) mode. That is, a host controls the read/write operation of multiple hard disks through communication with a RAID controller.
As the number of hard disks is large, the full-load power consumption of all hard disks may account for over 20% of the total power consumption of an entire server or disk array. The power consumption of a hard disk in standby mode is low. For example, the read/write power consumption of a 2.5-inch hard disk drive of a certain model is 3.5 watts to 4.6 watts, but its power consumption in standby mode is only 1 watt. In the prior art, the host sets hard disks in the standby state in idle hours, thereby significantly reducing the power consumption of a single device and the cooling system in the equipment room.
During the running process, however, the RAID controller will regularly, for example, at an interval of 3 minutes, scan hard disks and execute certain fault detection operations. In this case, hard disks will be abnormally awakened shortly after entering the standby state even in idle hours, reducing the energy conservation effects.